The Magnificent Methvens Medway Kent

How did it come about that you began fostering with The Hazel Project?

Barbara; We’d been thinking about it for a while but we were both working full time. We lost our youngest son Daniel very suddenly, which left a huge hole in our family and for the first 2 years after, we just bumbled through life. We didn’t really celebrate anything, it was like the shutters had come down. One day we went to see our son Nathan and he said “Mum we’re going to be doing fostering, so they might get hold of you for questions”. We came back home and sat and thought about it and talked about it and decided we’ll give it a go. I mean, we have got so much love I think haven’t we?

Spencer; Yes and we like kids. We’ve had kids around us because our grandchildren and great grandchildren have always come and stayed with us. We’ve always had children around us and what we try to do with the children that come to stay on their holiday with us is make sure it’s a holiday. So yeah, they do get a bit spoilt!

Barbara; Very spoilt! Our great grandchildren come over and interact and play with them which is incredible. We laugh a lot, especially with the kids that we have. We had a little lad at the weekend and I’ve never known a child say “wow” or “bloody hell” so many times!

Spencer; It’s incredible, we took him to Costco and he couldn’t believe it, the size of it. He was just walking around amazed, going “wow”.

Barbara; “bloody hell”.

And what were you doing before you began fostering?

Spencer; I was in the prison service for 20 plus years and then I got the opportunity to retire when I was 45. We already had grandchildren then and I had this great idea – we’ll take our eldest grandchild to Florida – and then our children kept producing grandchildren so it became an annual tradition that Grandad takes us to Florida, so Grandad had to go back to work to pay for that! I went and did a bit of driving work because I didn’t want to be in management anymore and ended up driving a bus. Then I started doing a school run with children with additional needs. Barbara had given up her job and was actually my escort on the bus so we worked together for 4 or 5 years before deciding to “retire” and foster children for a quiet life!

Barbara; I had worked in the garages for quite a few years and I’d worked my way up to area manager of 12 garages. I was often working 12 to 14 hour days and it was getting too much for me so I went into the Heart Foundation shops, sorting them all out. Coming home one night I had a horrendous car accident where a foreign lorry hit me and I couldn’t drive up and down the motorway for a couple of years after that. Spencer said to me that they are looking for escorts for the children on the bus and I said oh i’ll give it a go and I absolutely loved it.

Spencer; We used to play cds every day and get the children singing. Quite often we’d pull up to the school with 9 children singing their heads off and the teachers would just look at our bus and shake their heads.

Barbara; It was the noisiest bus ever! It got the kids to school in a really good mood and hopefully they came home in a good mood after being on the bus with us.

Spencer; We loved it but we were getting older and we thought right we’re going to give it up and then the process for fostering started and that was a lot quicker than we initially thought. We went to panel on the 1st of December 2022 and we had a phone call that same afternoon.

Barbara; We’d only been home about an hour!

Spencer; Saying you’ve been accepted to foster and please can you have these 8 year old twins. So Barbara had to finish early so that we could have these 2 little twins and then after they left we had another young lad, Ronnie, who had recently come into the care system and he stayed all over Christmas and New Year. We’ve had some children that have been slightly challenging but Barbara has a manner about her that deals with that very well. We find that if you’ve got an elder lad and the other two are sisters, the elder lad can feel a bit left out so I take them out for boys days. They come out with me to clean the car or we go to B&Q or Pets at Home to get all the dog and cat food and it’s a boys day out. Inevitably when they’re out with me, they get a KFC or whatever and of course they love that.

Has fostering brought difficult times?

Barbara; Only once, I’m trying not to laugh, we went to the goat sanctuary and we were asked to leave. We had 3 siblings at the time and I bought them all a bag of carrots. Now, some of the goats have red collars on and you’re not allowed to feed them because they’re on a special diet, some have purple collars because they are pregnant. I was showing one of siblings and she didn’t like it, so she started throwing the carrots at the goats and of course all the goats that weren’t supposed to eat the carrots were in there eating them so i said to her “no, you mustn’t do that, if you don’t want to feed them it doesn’t matter just watch your little brother do it”. Well, tantrum? I’ve never seen a tantrum like it in my life!

Spencer; Major!

Barbara; Major! So I said to her “right, we’ve got to go now because you’re upsetting the goats with all this noise, either you can calm down and have more fun and we can walk around the field and see all of the rest of the goats or we’re going home”. She threw herself on the floor, feet stamping, screaming, so I picked her up and went up over the field with her and I said, “come on, you’re getting yourself all upset here”. She said “but I don’t want to go” and I said “well you have got a choice, because of all this noise and everything we all have to go”. So I got her into the car, she kicked the hell out of the inside of the car, kicking the seat, kicking the ceiling, banging on the glass. She got home and when she got out of the car, she said “oh GG (Barbara’s nickname), can we go down the park now” as if nothing had happened! I just smiled and thought “well there you go”.

Spencer; I think she had to do it, you know, for whatever reason but it was the only time.

Barbara; Yep, and she was as good as gold after that, she was brilliant.

Spencer; One thing we’ve noticed quite a lot with those who are new into care is that often they’ve only ever had takeaways. Here, at dinnertime, we turn the tv off and we sit at the table and they don’t know what to use, how to eat with a knife and fork, because they’ve only ever eaten with their fingers. A lot of them have this idea that they’ll only eat Mcdonalds fries, they don’t eat any other sort of potatoes and they don’t eat vegetables. What I do is make up silly names for meals. I took 2 to school recently and I said right, we’ve got volcanoes for tea tonight, they were all “oh what’s volcanoes?”. It’s baked beans and mash and sausages but I pile the mash up and stick the sausages in the side and I pour the beans over the top like a volcano. They loved it. They don’t like mashed potatoes and they don’t like sausages, but they’ll eat volcanos!

Barbara; And bungalow pie.

Spencer; I do bungalow pie instead of cottage pie and I bung a load of different stuff in it.

Barbara; different vegetables.

Spencer – Because children don’t like them but we put it in there…they love it cos its bungalow pie! At the end of the week or however long we help them, they are asking for these meals again and all of a sudden theyre eating vegetables.

Barbara; We take them to the supermarket to pick the vegetables out. We were there one day and there were aubergines and they said “what do these taste like, can I try them”? So I said I’ll tell you what, we’ll make vegetable lasagna, we picked some courgettes and other vegetables. They absolutely loved it and wanted it again.

Spencer; It’s really good to see them sitting there with a knife and fork, tucking in and eating. Then we get phone calls from their foster parents saying what the hell is bungalow pie because they’ve asked for it!

What qualities do you think are important for a foster parent to have?

Barbara; You’ve got to listen, listen to the children and have patience.

Spencer; Yes, let them talk, when they feel like it and I think let them be a child because some of them, because of what’s happened, they’ve been forced to take on adult traits far too early. I think if you can get that out and let them be a child and just play and giggle, there’s nothing better than seeing young kids come to us that are initially quite resistant to us, in their own little shell and all of a sudden you can break that down and start to see them giggle. In the summer we can take them down to our sons and I get all the youngsters to feed the chickens out of the palm of their hands. When you see this little 4 or 5 year old with the worm feed in their hand and the chickens pecking away – the look on their faces, they’ve never done it before! And they go and get the eggs out of the run and they’re amazed, they say “what are they doing in here, they come from a box in a shop”. It’s silly things that make them laugh.